With all eyes turned to 29-year-old Edward Snowden, the former
CIA analyst who leaked documents about the National Security
Agency’s domestic spying is already on his way to becoming the
most discussed man in America. Less than 24 hours after the
Guardian went public with Snowden’s identity on Sunday, the
leaker’s personal life and politics have already taken center
stage.

Now at the center of some discussions is Snowden’s endorsement of
Ron Paul during last year’s presidential race, a revelation that
is providing a rare glimpse into the ideologies of a man who will
likely face decades in prison for going public.

According to donation info published by the Center for Responsive
Politics’ website OpenSecrets.org, Snowden made two contributions
totaling $500 to the presidential campaign of then-Rep. Ron Paul
(R-Texas) during the last calendar year. Snowden made a $250
contribution to Rep. Paul on March 18, 2012, and another $250
donation on May 6.

Rep. Paul was vying for the Republican Party’s nomination as
president during last year’s election, ultimately losing that
slot to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Paul ended his
active campaigning phrase shortly after Snowden’s second
contribution was made and retired from Congress in early 2013
after serving decades on Capitol Hill.

Although other links between Snowden and Paul haven’t been
published yet, the leaker did say in an interview this week that
he supported a third party presidential candidate during the 2008
race that ultimately ended in a win for Barack Obama, a Democrat.

"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for
him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's
promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his
election]. He continued with the policies of his
predecessor,” Snowden told the Guardian.

Before Barack Obama won his bid for the White House in 2008, he
campaigned on a promise of having the most transparent
presidential administration in the history of the United States.
Today his office continues to stand by that vow despite
spearheading an unprecedented war against leakers. The Obama
administration has so far charged seven people under the
Espionage Act, and more leakers have been prosecuted under that
legislation than by every previous president combined.

Snowden is reported to currently be in Hong Kong after fleeing
his apartment in Hawaii at the beginning of last month. He
previously worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and,
most recently, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He only
worked there for three months before the Guardian published top
secret documents last week about the NSA’s phone and Internet
surveillance programs, operated for years under a provision of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and a well-hidden
program called PRISM.

"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to
intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast
majority of human communications are automatically ingested
without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's
phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails,
passwords, phone records [and] credit cards,” Snowden told
the Guardian.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of
things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do
and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to
support or live under."

Before the Guardian went public with Snowden’s allegations about
the spy program — then later his identity — the leaker went to
the Washington Post and asked them to publish his evidence of
PRISM.

“Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would
publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a
PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret
surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft,
Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants,” Post
reporter Barton Gellman admitted this week.

“I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we
published or when,” Gellman recalled for the Post. According
to Gellman, “The Post sought the views of government officials
about the potential harm to national security prior to
publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41
slides.”

Snowden’s attempt to expose the secretive program through the
Washington Post draws an eerie parallel to the case of Bradley
Manning, the 25-year-old Army private who gave hundreds of
thousands of sensitive government files to the anti-secrecy
website WikiLeaks — but not before his phone calls to the Post
and New York Times were ignored.

“I maintain that government becomes more secret and the
people’s privacy is being destroyed. We should protect the
people’s privacy and we should make the government much more
open,” Paul said last April during a campaign stop in San
Antonio, Texas.

“I would certainly lean in the direction of protecting people
that are trying to tell the truth,” said Paul. “The more
openness the better. That’s what a free society is all about. It
wouldn’t be so critical if the government was a lot smaller, but
because it is so big it is big issue because there is so much
that could be hidden.”